Category Archives: mystery

A (Fictional) Trip to Japan

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The art, architecture, and traditions of the Land of the Rising Sun have always fascinated me, which gives the backdrops of these stories added pleasure.

The Puzzle Box by Danielle Trussoni

How you feel about puzzles will likely color your reaction to Danielle Trussoni’s new thriller, a follow-on to her well-received 2023 book, The Puzzle Master. I love puzzles, included a puzzle box in my mystery-thriller, Architect of Courage, and thought I’d found the perfect read.

Mike Brink is a New York City puzzle creator who suffered a brain injury that left him with the extremely rare “acquired savant” syndrome. Savants have extraordinary cognitive abilities in a single field. For Mike Brink, it’s solving puzzles, along with the supporting mathematics. Life and relationships aren’t easy for him and, interestingly, Mike would prefer to be less “special.”

The Imperial family has asked a US-raised young Japanese woman, Sakura Nakamoto, to convince Mike to try to open the Dragon Puzzle Box, a feat attempted in secret only every twelve years. Renowned puzzle experts have tried and failed, and failure is fatal.

In Japan, a woman named Ume is training a small cadre of young women to be warriors as ruthless as herself, female samurai. They believe whatever is hidden in the Dragon Puzzle Box can restore the samurai to power. Meanwhile, another powerful antagonist also wants the Box’s contents, in order to pursue one of those “fate of the world hangs in the balance” missions that strain my credulity. Even if Mike can open the Box without dying in the process, the dangers will be only just beginning.

I like the elements of Japanese culture that Trussoni includes in this tale. She lived several years in Japan and the story environment certainly carries the feel of authenticity. A “foreign” setting is almost always extra exciting, simply because the rules are different there, and they are very different indeed in the Imperial court setting!

The Labyrinth House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji

No doubt Christie, Chandler, Sayers, Hammett, and their brethren would be quite comfortable reading this story, inspired by Golden Age traditions, the fourth of the author’s Bizarre House Mysteries.

The house of prominent Japanese mystery writer Miyagaki Yōtarō was constructed as a giant labyrinth (maps are helpfully provided to the guests—and readers). For his sixtieth birthday, he plans a celebration involving talented young writers he has mentored, his editor/critic Utayama Hideyuki, and mystery fan Shimada Kiyoshi.

The arriving guests meet Miyagaki’s secretary who makes the astonishing revelation that their host, dying of cancer, has committed suicide. Miyagaki’s posthumous instructions ask them not to call the police for five days and not to try to leave. He also asks the four authors to use the days to write the best detective story they can, which Utayama and Shimada will judge. The winner will receive half of Miyagaki’s considerable estate. Initially nonplussed, the writers quickly rally and commit to the project. Thus, you have a classic locked-room mystery. It doesn’t tax your imagination to guess the partygoers will begin dropping like flies.

Utayama and Shimada take the lead in investigating, but neither can be sure the other isn’t the mysterious killer. Most puzzling is that the positioning of each body and the cause of death mimics the newly deceased’s draft story.

I learned less about Japanese culture than I might have expected and quite a bit more about the personalities of ambitious authors than I might have wanted. Miyagaki well understood what he was dealing with when he set up this unusual challenge. Each murder necessitates a lengthy deconstruction of the surrounding events, the location of other guests at the probable time of the crime, and its relation to the story begun on their word processors. It begins to feel like an overlong unravelling, but all points to a classic fair-play conclusion. Will you figure it out before Utayama and Shimada do?

The March of Television

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This spring promises several new television seasons and series that should be worth watching. But first, let me praise the extremely quirky Interior Chinatown, which we’ve watched over the last few months. It’s based on a 2020 novel by Charles Yu, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. A couple of episodes in, I realized I’d actually read this book. I did not get it at all. My reaction: “Huh?”

But someone must have, and the transition to the small screen is terrific. Jimmy O. Yang plays Willis Wu, a background character in a police drama set in a fictional city. His parents, especially his mom, have some hilarious moments, as does his fellow waiter, Fatty Choi, who thrives on insulting the restaurant’s customers. The plot is essentially indescribable, but Wu is on a quest to find out what happened to his older brother, whom the TV show calls “Kung Fu Guy.” Many hilarious and heartfelt moments. Watch it on Hulu.

On TV this spring, I’m looking forward to the televised version of Liz Moore’s Long Bright River, a book I enjoyed immensely. In it, a cop who works in Philadelphia’s rough Kensington neighborhood, scene of a series of prostitute murders, never escapes the fear that one day what she’ll find is the body of her renegade sister. Amanda Seyfried plays the police officer, Mickey Fitzpatrick. Excellent family interactions in the novel; I hope they’re preserved. Coming on Peacock March 13.

Damian Lewis will reprise his role as Henry VIII in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the third book in the late Hilary Mantel’s riveting series about Tudor political shenanigans involving the King, Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), and Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce). The books were great, and the acting in this series, first aired in 2015 as Wolf Hall, is exceptional. Wolf Hall was the ancestral home of Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, the one (out of eight) he presumably most loved. It’s premiering March 23 on PBS.

Another season of Dark Winds arrives March 9 on AMC. This crime series, set on Arizona’s Navajo reservation, is based on Tony Hillerman’s popular books featuring Sheriff Joe Leaphorn and his deputy Jim Chee. Leaphorn is played by Zahn McClarnon, an actor I came to admire in the Longmire series, and Chee by Kiowa Gordon. The rest of the mostly Native American cast is also strong. And you can’t beat the beautifully stark Southwestern landscape.

I’ll also give a try to the British detective drama Ludwig, which aired on the BBC in 2024, but will be available on BritBox starting March 20. The title character (played by actor-comedian David Mitchell) is a puzzle-maker, and Ludwig is his pen name. His identical twin brother (I know, I know, beware of twins) is a Cambridge police DCI who’s gone missing. Ludwig poses as his brother to get access to police information about the disappearance. He is, of course, taken for the detective, and becomes caught up in the department’s investigations. Puzzle-solving should come in handy.

Not Paranormal, Just Different

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An interesting recent discussion between two indigenous American authors got me thinking about the issue of paranormal. (And, not for the first time, wondering what’s “normal,” anyway, in these times?) Some elements in the books of Ramona Emerson of the Diné (Navaho) tribe and Marcie Rendon, a member of the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa (Ojibwe)—both multiple literary award-winners, by the way—might fit into a broad paranormal category, but they reject that characterization.

Emerson is the author of two books in her series featuring Rita Todacheene a forensic photographer, able to see in her mind the circumstances of the crimes she is meticulously documenting. (Find her remarkable books here and here.) Rendon, who is also a playwright and poet, writes the popular Cash Blackbear crime series, featuring a young Ojibwe woman, whose guardian is a sheriff, which brings her into occasional contact with violent crime. The fourth book in Rendon’s series, Broken Fields, will be available March 2025. Blackbear’s visions and intuitive abilities help in solving crimes, and the author explores the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women. In both authors’ books, you find a rich source of information and perspective on the protagonists’ cultural milieu.

In a recent webinar, Emerson interviewed Rendon, and they mentioned the “paranormal” issue. Publishers and agents when musing about what they’re looking for in manuscript submissions today increasingly mention their attraction to paranormal elements. It’s not clear exactly what they have in mind. But it is something both women claim to not write. They haven’t decided to paste on some not easily explained or supernatural element. “It’s just part of who we are,” Rendon said, “a different belief system.” In it, dreams are important, she said, and they discuss them each morning. In my dream last night, I was looking for something I couldn’t find—typical!

Her character Cash Blackbear’s visions let her see beyond objective reality. In the Ojibwe culture, such thinking is part-and-parcel of daily existence. In part, that’s because the wisdom of the ancestors guides them through life, and people talk to and “see” their ancestors frequently. And not only because they are “surrounded by spirit houses” (little houses built atop graves mounds). Despite these frequent contacts, interactions with ancestors or the spirit world are done within certain parameters, certain specific rules. Personally, I’d like to understand more.

Naturally, because this is such a different way of thinking, acceptance is hard for people raised in a culture that emphasizes rationality and scientific proof as the keys to understanding the world. From the inside, as Emerson portrays Rita Todacheene, this different way is also hard to simply dismiss.

Another recent book that draws on this type of thinking is Jennifer Givhan’s 2023 novel, River Woman, River Demon. Givhan is a Mexican-American and indigenous author whose story weaves together the otherworldly and the everyday swirling around a murder. It isn’t a novel I would ordinarily gravitate to, but Givhan made it a powerful story, and I’m glad I read it.

Reaching for my more comfortably familiar analytic hat, I can’t help wondering whether stories like these are achieving resonance in this era when the rational seems to have flown out the window. Maybe people are seeking a little wisdom from unconventional sources to help them get through. But that would be selling these books short. These are compelling tales from a less conventional point of view that deserve to be read and thought about in any time period.

Take-Aways

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In a post last week based in part on an interview with award-winning author Laura van den Berg, she talked about the strangeness we encounter in daily life. Some people may see mysteries in that strangeness, some see the workings of the supernatural, and some just pass right by, eyes glued to cell phone. Now that’s strange! The current Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine includes a number of stories that anticipate Halloween and the different ways people react to such hard-to-explain happenings.

Strangeness and ambiguity are useful tools in fiction, not just at Halloween. In real life, friendships may suddenly end, marriages dissolve, and we may not know why—even when we’re one of the principals. Conversely, the things that keep a relationship going can be equally puzzling.

To van den Berg, the ambiguity in a story can be either positive or negative. Even when a story doesn’t provide all the answers, she says, “it should give [readers] something to take away.” Inexperienced writers, trying to achieve a sense of mystery, may under-explain, running the risk of merely creating confusion and giving their readers nothing to latch onto. It’s equally off-putting when authors over-explain. Trust your readers to figure many things out. A friend used to write sentences like, “He threw the plate against the wall because he was angry.” Clearly, the “because” clause is completely unnecessary. “She spent an hour on her makeup because she wanted to look her best.” Ditto.

A story’s ending is an important contributor to what the reader will take from it. Van den Berg’s approach to finding the endings of her stories doesn’t sound like a huge assembly of 3 x 5 cards and post-its. Nor does she flail around trying to discover the ending in a morass of prose. Instead, she says she often sees the ending as “an image of some kind.” She may not initially see all the action steps (plot) that will get her there, but she’s moving toward it, through the fog of creation, following the glow of a distant light.

In the mystery/crime/thriller genre, an ending is likely to be unsatisfying if it leaves too many mysteries unsolved, too many loose ends. When I’m writing, I keep a list of unresolved story questions. They may be tangible issues such as, How does Evie know Carl has a peanut allergy? Or less tangible ones, like, If Steve really loves Diana, why did he have an affair?

I don’t have to work out an answer to them the moment they come up (an invitation to backstory that derails the flow), but when I arrive at the end, I check my list. Are all the questions that can be answered with a fact addressed in some logical and preferably unobtrusive way? Have the intangible questions at least been considered by the character? It isn’t necessary that readers completely believe a character’s explanations, but they should be confident the character believes them, at least at some level. A frequent and annoying cop-out is the phrase, “he had no choice but to . . .” following which the author steers the character into some plot-necessary action. Of course there were choices, and it is the writer who made one. Slightly better is when characters say, “I had no choice . . .” Yes, you recognize they’re probably just rationalizing. Weakly. Unpersuasively. Which of itself says something about them.

You may recall that one of the necessaries of a short story is “it needs to have a point.” That doesn’t mean a political point, or a hit-them-over-the-head-with-a-hammer point. It’s more subtle, something that grounds the stories despite and because of life’s mysteries. Irish author Anne Enright said it well, “Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.” You, the writer, are the rock in a sea of ambiguity.

The Serpent Dance

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With Sofia Slater’s latest crime mystery, you have not only an intriguing whodunnit, but, although it’s set in contemporary times, The Serpent Dance feels like a trip back in time to the era when Cornish midsummer revelries first involved bonfires, iconic music, river offerings, and the creation of wicker animals, later consumed by the ritual fire. Slater draws on the persistence of these ancient practices, mixing the traditional and the modern in ways that occasionally baffle her protagonist.

London graphic designer Audrey Delaney’s boyfriend of ten months, Noah, has planned a surprise getaway for them. She’s convinced herself (and prematurely told all her friends) that he’s taking her to Paris. When it turns out they’re headed to the fictional Cornish village of Trevennick, she tries not to show her disappointment, but Noah realizes he’s missed the mark.

From there, their situation goes from bad to much, much worse. Their B&B is a modern, glass-walled home overlooking the river. Inside, it’s open-plan carried to an extreme. Their landlady will be staying in the master bedroom, with just a wisp of separation between her and the guest bedroom.

Their hostess is a renowned television personality, and Noah takes to her with unexpected enthusiasm. Something isn’t right. Why this place? What’s Noah’s real agenda? Why his interest in this older woman? The twisting lines of the eponymous serpent dance itself can’t compare to the secrets Audrey is about to discover.

No need to worry be jealous of their hostess, though, because before morning she lies dead in a pool of blood, a knife to her throat. The police initially consider it a suicide, but elements of the crime scene simply don’t add up. Since Audrey and Noah are the only other people in the house, and since anyone else padding about could not do so without risking being seen (all those glass walls), police attention is on them. On Noah, particularly.

The town is preparing for the midsummer Golowan festivities, masks and wicker obby orses everywhere. It’s a deeply local tradition and outsiders aren’t especially welcome, especially when the shadow of murder has fallen on them.

Though Noah is tucked away in jail, their hostess’s isn’t the only body to turn up. Audrey tackles her predicament in the way she tries to work through any difficult circumstance, by drawing, and the realism of her depiction of Stella’s corpse, among other local characters is inevitably misunderstood. It’s a classic case of being out of one’s own element. This profoundly unsettling atmosphere makes Audrey anxious about the wrong things, so that she doesn’t recognize the danger to herself.

I found the mix of past and present, culture and calamity quite captivating. Nice job, Sofia Slater! Order your copy here.

Murder Takes a Holiday

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cruise ship

A new issue in editor Janet Rudolph’s excellent Mystery Readers Journal, in which mystery and crime authors talk about what inspired them to write about a particular theme, setting, or domain and how they went about doing it. There’s a certain commonality to some sources of inspiration, but there are always those fascinating quirky bits. Some of the authors that are most interesting to me draw on a vast well of knowledge, experience, and research, so that it sometimes seems they could make a valuable contribution to almost any MRJ issue!

I was tremendously amused by the cover drawing for Summer 2024 (which is Volume 40, No. 2), “Murder Takes a Holiday.” It features the Grim Reaper, ensconced in a deck chair with a cocktail and a book (yay!), while a puzzled cruise passenger looks on. “Taking a holiday” for sure. One hopes.

In Donna Andrews’s essay “Monkey Business Meets the Flying Dutchman,” she points out the value of actually visiting the place or having (some aspect of) the experience you’re writing about. She wanted to write a locked room mystery involving a cruise, but had never been on one. Easy solution: book it! Though she soon found out the crew wasn’t very forthcoming when she asked her questions about crime aboard and missing persons. “They tended to look panic-stricken and find an excuse to sneak away whenever I asked,” she says.

All this reminded me of a recent conversation with friends about the number of people who actually do go missing from cruise ships every year—the very topic the crew of Andrews’s ship avoided. Their mantra: Cruises are fun! They’re exciting! (But not in that way.)

I knew nothing about the missing cruiser phenomenon until a few years ago when I reviewed Sebastian Fitzek’s thriller, Passenger 23, for CrimeFictionLover.com. His premise of a serial killer disposing of cruise ship passengers struck me at first as an eye-roller. Then I did some research. At that time, an estimated 23 people a year—passengers and crew members alike—disappeared from the world’s cruise ships.

That number was widely viewed as an underestimate, because of the cruise shop operators’ public relations imperative to keep such incidents under wraps. They also encourage the narrative that disappearances are suicides, though often there is no evidence of that, or even contrary evidence.

Investigation is often left to a police official from the ship’s country-of-registry. For Carnival Cruises, that would be Panama, and possibly the Bahamas or Malta, where Celebrity Cruises also are registered. Disney? The Bahamas. The initial investigation and autopsy for a woman who died on a Carnival ship in 2023 was conducted by Bahamian authorities. They concluded it was a natural death, but the FBI considered it suspicious and began its own investigation some days after-the-fact, when the ship docked in Charleston.

In a case of presumed suicide from a Royal Caribbean ship late last month, the company is being fairly close-mouthed. Said a lawyer who investigates such incidents, “It’s rare for a company to publish anything that could make them seem liable for the death”—including issues like alcohol consumption.

These incentives and circumstances create the perfect set-up for deadly shenanigans. The Mystery Readers Journal cover artist apparently thought so too!

(photo: ed2456 on pixabay; creative commons license)

EQMM – March/April 2024

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A great plot keeps you reading, compelling characters make you care. But in my case it’s the love of words that brings a smile to my face. Authors using them in clever new ways. Painting indelible pictures with them. Hinting to me that they love the language as much as I do.

The short stories in the current issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine show once again that mystery writers can be just as expert at manipulating the English language as their more literary cousins. So many excellent stories in terms of the plot/character/setting basics, plus a couple whose deft prose grabbed my attention.

First, let me mention Bill Pronzini’s story, “The Finger,” because it has an affinity with this theme. His character is a successful and prolific writer of international suspense novels who has been known to crank out a 100,000-word thriller in just five weeks. Clearly, this man writes at a devilish speed, aided by superb touch typing skills. When an infection causes him to lose the little finger of his right hand, his typing speed plummets and, worse, the cascade of ideas that propelled that lightning pace has dried up too. Instead, Pronzini writes, “the innovative similes and metaphors that were the hallmarks of his work came less easily and tended to be trite instead of original. The prose stuttered and bumbled.”  

In this collection, there are several examples of “innovative similes and metaphors” that this nine-fingered author could have been justly proud of, in my opinion, and no stuttering and bumbling. Here are three examples I especially admired:

In Nils Gilbertson’s unsentimental story “Apple Juice,” he describes this scene: “By the time he reached the barn, night had turned to early morn and sun shone through bare trees, their branches like petrified veins against the cornflower sky.” Petrified veins. I look at my hands and see that instantly.

The EQMM Department of First Stories offers “Murder Under Sedation” by Lawrence Ong, and though this is his first detective story in EQMM, he rips off a clever putdown of every dreary dental waiting room everywhere: “I scanned the magazines on the rack to count how many are still in print before turning my attention to the waiting room’s other occupant.” I laughed.

“Turnabout” by Sheila Kohler contains a short passage, a model of subtlety, that conveys more meaning than some entire novels. The narrator and her longtime friend Jane walk into Jane’s husband’s study, where he and another visitor, Sergei, sit in armchairs opposite each other, smoking and not speaking. “It was something about the silence, I think, that spoke so clearly to me, or perhaps the way they were looking at one another, something in the brown-green and the blue-grey eyes which, young though I was, I recognized. I looked at Jane. Did she, smart girl that she was, understand what was going on?”

Great job, one and all!

Past Lying by Val McDermid

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Publication of a new police procedural featuring Val McDermid’s intrepid Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie is something to get excited about. In Past Lying, the streets of Edinburgh have never been so ominous—and empty—as when this story takes place in April 2020, at the height of the covid epidemic. Authors were of mixed minds about whether to write about covid, thinking “too much already!” but McDermid makes the lockdown an effective handicap to Pirie, whose investigation of a not-quite-stone-cold case must (at least in theory) accommodate the public health restrictions.

Pirie and Detective Sergeant Daisy Mortimer are camped out in Pirie’s boyfriend Hamish’s fancy flat while he has relocated up north to tend his sheep farm in the Highlands. He’s bought a former gin still up there and is manufacturing hand sanitizer.

As ever, Pirie has a couple of pots bubbling away. One complication in her life is a subplot involving a Syrian refugee being hunted by assassins from his home country. I’ve always admired how McDermid keeps two powerful story strands going, such that when she switches from one to the other, I’m instantly engrossed again. In this instance, the secondary plot isn’t as compelling as it might be, and the exigencies of covid mean there is less interaction with some of Pirie’s colleagues in various crime labs who serve such a satisfying role in other works.

The main plot is more squarely in the domain of Pirie’s Historic Cases Unit. In touch with her by telephone, Detective Constable Jason ‘The Mint’ Murray reports that a librarian, reviewing papers submitted by the estate of a deceased Tartan Noir crime writer, Jake Stein, has run across the opening chapters of an unpublished manuscript. They describe a murder that sounds eerily similar to an unsolved disappearance from the previous year, in which an Edinburgh University student named Lara Hardie vanished.

What Jake Stein has written compel Pirie and Mortimer to dig into his past. Stein was apparently not a very nice guy; he was in the middle of a marital calamity; and his formerly successful career was on the skids. His only remaining friend is another author who’d come and play chess with him and where Stein would talk about “the perfect murder.” The parallels between Stein’s real life and his fictional book are striking, so that the narrative takes on the characteristics of nested dolls. I found myself having to stop and think, am I reading Stein’s book? Or about him?

If you have read other McDermid books featuring Pirie (this is the seventh), you may have run across DC Jason Murray previously. You may recall he’s sometimes considered not the brightest bulb, but in this book, he finally comes into his own. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the stresses of lockdown, but I found Pirie a less sympathetic character than usual. At times, she’s almost mean. She pays lip service to the lockdown rules, but ignores them whenever she wants to. The justification that every day is important to the family of a disappeared person wore a little thin.

A crime novelist is an ideal character to obsess about the perfect crime, and Stein’s draft-cum-confession, as you read it, raises a multitude of good questions—not necessarily relevant to his plot, nor his personal life, but about Pirie’s investigation. Nesting dolls again.

While McDermid has certainly earned the sobriquet of Britain’s ‘Queen of Crime,’ I confess to a slight disappointment with this latest book. Of course, it’s still head and shoulders above many crime novels, and if you like the Pirie character, you won’t want to miss it.

Kill Show by Daniel Swearen-Becker

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Author Daniel Sweren-Becker must have been well tuned in to the zeitgeist when he conceived Kill Show, his newly published mysteryl that delves into important critiques of the true crime genre. Written in the style of a television documentary script, the novel consists almost entirely of short verbatim quotes from 26 of the story’s principals, with no descriptions unless a character happens to provide one. The principals are being re-interviewed a decade after the events they’re called upon to explore. The book is their testimony.

Ten years earlier, in suburban Frederick County, Maryland, 16-year-old Sara Parcell disappeared. Her parents and brother panicked. Her friends were bereft. School officials tried to console. Local police were baffled. Now, as they talk about Sara, her family, the community, the disappearance and its aftermath, they amplify, contextualize, and at times contradict each other. Piece by piece, the story comes into focus.

In the emotional turmoil immediately after Sara’s disappearance, her dad, Dave Parcell, waves his bank statement in front of the cameras camped outside his home. He has $1762. That’s all. But he’ll put it every dollar of it up for a reward. A dramatic moment the news cameras catch, but not as viral as the cell-phone video Sara’s brother Jack makes a few moments later, showing Dave and his wife Jeannette back in their house, embracing, Jeannette in hysterics.

Across the country in Hollywood, Jack’s video sparks a brilliant programming idea in the head of Casey Hawthorne, a reality TV show producer. She convinces her boss to pay for her and a production crew to fly to Maryland, and then convinces the Parcell family that a reality television series—Searching for Sara—will bring massive attention to the disappearance and help get their daughter back.

They are desperate. They agree. To say Casey Hawthorne is full of herself, manipulative, and not to be trusted hardly describes the extent of the void in her character. Once in Maryland, right at the start, she makes a strategic choice that negatively influences everything that comes afterward. She meets Detective Felix Calderon in a bar, and, rather than revealing who she is and why she’s really in town, she lies. And sleeps with him. As a result, when aspects of the case start to deteriorate, the lead detective on the case has no credibility with the public, his superiors in the police department, or the prosecutor.

Of course, many more people involved in this debacle are lying. And, if not lying outright, they’re not telling the whole truth, or they’re shading it to justify their actions. Many characters undergo a shift in perspective over the course of the weeks the search drags on and shocking revelations emerge; others seem incapable of taking new information on board. In the end, quite a few Frederick County residents have reason to take a hard look at the role they played in the outcome.

When Sweren-Becker wants to delve into ethical grey areas, he provides comments from a pop culture critic or a sociology professor. In that way too, the novel reads very much like a real-life television documentary. This device never becomes tedious or heavy-handed. Meanwhile, in real life, true-crime dramas have come in for criticism, even though they’re still immensely popular. (A 2014 13-episode podcast, Serial, also about the murder of a Maryland teenager was downloaded more than 340 million times in the first four years of its availability.) Sweren-Becker’s story effectively demonstrates the main critiques of the genre: exploiting real people for entertainment, looking for sensation rather than examining systemic problems, and objectifying victims. Casey Hawthorne’s Searching for Sara is definitely guilty on the first two counts. If you have your own reservations about the public obsession with true-crime shows, this book will confirm them. Partly due to the format and partly to the compelling situation, this is a quick read, yet a profound one. Highly recommended.

More critique of the true-crime phenomenon are in my recent blog post: “Is peak true crime in the rearview?”

Two Movies to Watch For

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A Haunting in Venice
Kenneth Branagh’s third film outing as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is certainly loaded with stylish touches (trailer). A dark and stormy night, water everywhere. A gloomy palazzo where a Halloween party for orphans is staged. A crashing chandelier. Masked gondoliers. A psychic invited in the hope she can communicate with a former opera star’s dead daughter. Directed by Branagh and written by Michael Green.

Oh, and a houseful of suspects. Branagh has made a third try at getting right the mustache which prompted so many cackles in Murder on the Orient Express. This one is . . . interesting. Layers. No sign of the scar mentioned in Death on the Nile as the reason for growing the thing in the first place. Although the first two movies hewed closer to the original Agatha Christie novel, this story based on her novel Hallowe’en Party, has strayed off into territory of its own.

Super supporting cast—Tina Fey as mystery writer Ariadne Oliver who inveigles Poirot into investigating the medium; Kelly Reilly as the opera singer; Michelle Yeoh as the psychic; and the brilliant Camille Cottin as the housekeeper. (You may remember Cottin as the star theatrical agent in the French comedy series, Call My Agent.) And, you may recognize Jude Hill as the boy who played the lead in Branagh’s Belfast. Here he plays the 12-year-old son of a PTSD-afflicted doctor, played by Jamie Dornan, his father in Belfast too.

All you’ll miss if you wait for Haunting to stream is the scenery. A Gothic pall overlays the story, but the plot itself is a tad weak. Not mysterious enough for a mystery and not scary enough for horror. Christie’s original must have been shocking, though, because it’s the only one of her books in which a child was the murder victim. Not here. Here it’s Poirot who almost becomes the victim of apple-bobbing. Not great, but you don’t leave the theater feeling bludgeoned by sound effects, either.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 76%; audiences: 78%.

Theater Camp
While the movies about kids’ summer camps have worn their jokes thin as tissue-paper already, don’t let that discourage you from seeing this fresh take on the genre from directors Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman (trailer). It stars Tony award-winner Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen), Molly Gordon as loyal camp counselors and Noah Galvin as tech support, plus an ensemble of hammy, misfit campers.

The long-time owner of a theater camp in the Adirondacks (it’s Camp AdirondACTS) falls ill and is unable to carry on. Her son (Jimmy Tatro), who has no feeling for theater, kids, or camp takes over. He fancies himself a finance genius, which seems in his mind to consist of writing himself many inspiring post-its. Can the counselors save the day?

Fun and refreshing, it’s what you’d call a “small movie,” and since it’s already probably too late to see it on the Big Screen, Hulu is streaming it.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 85%; audiences: 80%.